by M. Christian
A game . . . only a game? Absently, Eddy chalked her cue as she walked over to the table. She could just put the cue down, shake Fats’s hand and walk out into the fresh night. Maybe a cup of coffee, a cheeseburger in some diner, then back to their cheap room. A kiss, Eddy’s hand cupping Daisy’s small, firm breast; Daisy reaching down, pulling her cotton dress up and off, standing in the cool night air of the room in bra and panties. White cotton below and yellowed nylon above, holding Daisy’s perky little breasts like deep secrets. With a sly smile, she’d reach behind her back, unsnap and reveal herself-two neat puddings, pale and silky, yet firm and upswept. Nipples burning pink, like they’d been lipstick-painted.
Then, reaching down, she’d step out of her simple cotton, revealing the uncommon beauty of her golden-coloured curls. Then she’d stand, naked in the dim light, a lithe nymph, a Kansas goddess, a strong little wheat and plains sprite.
They’d kiss, they’d suck nipples, they’d lick clits, they’d come. Eddy was the easiest, the quickest to scream, shout, with Daisy sometime thereafter. It would be wonderful; and then they’d do it the next morning, the next afternoon, the next night.
The table was green felt, a deep verdant green – like the Amazon must look from high above. An impenetrable green. Just a game?
“Come on, Eddy,” Daisy said with firm exhaustion, determined tones in her voice. “Come on.”
But this wasn’t about winning and losing. It was Eddy’s way, her real passion; the green of the felt was the colour of her special lust. Her lust to be the best, to be better than anyone. “Go back to the room, Daisy. I have a game to play.” Then, not waiting to see if her lover had left, she turned to Fats and added in level tones: “Let’s play some pool.”
Eddy lost the next game, and the one after that, but the pain of losing wasn’t there. Instead she was building up speed, accelerating to where Fats was steadily cruising. She wasn’t there, not yet; but she could feel the groove, and knew that catching it was just a matter of time.
She won the next game but, like the loss, the win wasn’t hot. Eddy wasn’t there yet, not yet.
After she won the next game and the last ball sank home in its pocket, she knew she had the edge. She could taste it, she could hear the prolonged low note in her ears, there was a new clarity to everything. She almost put her cue away, almost shook Fats’s hand and walked out. She knew she had it, and she knew she’d win every game. The edge was there.
But she didn’t leave. Just knowing she had it wasn’t enough. She won the next three games; with each sinking ball her game grew clearer and more perfect until the cue was more than just an extension of her body, it was an extension of her will – a part of her mind. It was 15 to 12.
The sun had set a long time ago, and would rise soon. Time had become nothing but a way to measure the game. That she’d played through the whole night, that she hadn’t slept or eaten in over twelve hours, meant nothing. Only the game mattered.
It was good. It was very, very good.
Suddenly Fats’s voice broke loudly through the edge to reach Eddy: “That’s it, Eddy; You’ve won, you’ve beaten me.”
Eddy blinked away the glamour, saw Fats for what seemed like the first time. The gleam was gone from her gold tooth; her hands were bilious green from the velvet and the chalk, her skin was gleaming with sweat, and her shirt was sticking to her stomach and tits.
Eddy smiled, wide and true, and shook her damp hand. “Thanks for the game,” she said.
“Thank you, Eddy,” Fats said. “You play a damned good game of pool.”
Which Eddy knew meant she was the best. The best there was.
Daisy didn’t know the girl’s name and didn’t care. All she did care about was that the girl was there in the bed.
She was fresh, maybe too young, but eager and willing. They’d started flirting earlier in the night, just an hour after Daisy left the pool hall. She was behind the counter in a place called, simply, EATS. Young, plump – soft skin billowy and yielding under Daisy’s fingers – but best of all willing. It just wouldn’t do, to have such a perfect opportunity and have no one who wanted to play with her.
The girl had actually blushed when Daisy had taken her coat, hanging it behind the hotel room door: “You’re so gorgeous. I wanted to kiss you the instant I set eyes on you.”
Then Daisy did, and the girl’s blush deepened even more. “Th-thank you –” she’d stammered gently when the kiss ended. Was it for the compliment or the touch of her lips? Daisy didn’t know what the girl was thanking her for.
It didn’t take long. Her dress buttoned up the back, easy pickings. As they sat on the too soft hotel bed, kissing meekly and then with growing passion, Daisy’s knowledgeable fingers neatly popped one, two, three, then all of the girl’s buttons.
Weakly protesting, she’d tried to hold the dress together, only giving Daisy an excuse to tickle and nibble her mercilessly. When the tears had stopped and the laughter had died down the girl was in her bra and panties. Daisy looked at her for a long moment, savoring her plumpness: the way her breasts pushed up and around the confining bra, the twin little mounds of her nipples, the scratchy hairs peering around the elastic of her everyday panties, her gentle little swell of belly. “Tasty,” she’d mumbled as she took the nameless girl in her arms, and kissed her long and deep as her fingers explored the seams of those panties.
Wet – a marvellously pure wetness greeted her hunting fingers. A wetness of legend, a hungry virgin’s kind of wetness. Looking the girl in the eyes, she withdrew her hand to taste and murmur delighted sounds at the girl’s savoury cunt. Then she pushed her back onto the bed, knelt between her legs, gently pulled aside her so-wet panties and kissed, then licked her into a quick, shuddering orgasm – one of many.
The girl was young, juicy, and naïve. When it was time for her to return the favour her tongue slipped and missed, her fingers gripped Daisy’s thighs too tight, and her thumb and forefinger were too meek with Daisy’s nipples. When Daisy did come, it was more from her own quick fingers showing the way than from the girl’s timid explorations of Daisy’s body. Still, it was a good come. But simply coming wasn’t what made Daisy smile like a kitten that feasted on cream.
“I should be going,” she said as Daisy let her hands roam over her luscious body. When Daisy found a plump nipple and gently teased it into rubber hardness she whistled softly in excitement. “Don’t you have a girlfriend?”
“Yes,” Daisy said, dropping her mouth to the nipple, sucking and nibbling it into even further firmness. “I do.”
“What if she comes back?” the girl said with sudden fear.
“Maybe she will, maybe she won’t – not for a while yet anyway. Not if I played it well, that is.”
“I should still go,” the girl said, but Daisy pushed her back on the bed, resting a firm hand on her still wet cunt.
“Stay. I want to come again, and I want to make you come again, too.” Daisy bent down to part her fat labia and lick – once, very fast – making the girl whistle with a quick intake of breath. “I think I played it perfectly well; just the right amount of tantrum, the right amount of ego stroke. No, she won’t be back till dawn, at least. She won’t be back till she sweeps the table. We’ve got hours.”
“I don’t . . . understand,” the girl tried to say as Daisy licked her harder, longer, circling the throbbing bead of her clit.
“My Eddy has her game, and I have mine. And mine is to keep her busy while I fuck you at least five more times. Eddy’s good –” Daisy said with a wicked smile as she absently rubbed the girl’s hard clit “– but I’m the best there is.”
Everything but the Smell of Lilies
M. Christian
She is wearing spandex pants decorated with the bold black and white icons of half a dozen Tokyo corporations. Her hair is in dreads, spiced with glittering watch parts. Her shoes are new and intelligent, contouring to her feet as she runs out of the crowd towards the place. Her poncho is tiger-striped, th
e newest Eurotrash fad, and the bystanders can see, as she pumps those strong legs in those black and white spandex pants, that she doesn’t have a top on, and that her nipples (flashing out from under the red and black of the poncho) are only covered by crosses of black electrical tape. She is a mix of black and something else. All can see – even in the midnight glare of Broadway’s brilliance of neon, lasers, fluorescents, and headlights from blurring cars – that her skin is a brown – like stained wood. Her face is high-cheekboned, her lips dark brown, her eyes hidden behind mirrored image-intensifying glasses.
She is running for her life: down the street, through the sidewalk crowd – panic in her strides and panting breaths.
It is drizzling, like static. The muscle at the door to the place don’t like it because it messes up their radar goggles. The clients don’t like it because it gets their furs and leathers all wet. The street drek don’t like it ’cause it pisses off the money and the muscle and they usually take it out on whoever is closest and can’t afford to fight back. The limos come and go, a high-class and costly river of black plastic and steel. The rich’s banter is light and sparkling above the rain and it blends, as only it could in the twenty-first century, with the chatter from the muscle’s narrow-band radios.
She runs through the crowd, pushing street drek and citizens aside, glancing back over her shoulder at every opportunity. Panic lights her muscles, and she looks for someone to . . .
The words finally come out in an oscillating scream as she slams against the first ring of genetically enhanced, neuro-chemically boosted, electronically hot-wired thugs. True to their purpose and few remaining authentic brain cells, they smash back – surrounding her with dense muscle and squealing radios and pushing her back into the crowd.
Her hands are grasping claws, her nails draw blood in a triad streak down the face of one of them (who didn’t blink against his conditioning), and her legs hammer against his ballistic-nylon pants. Her scream sounds like some kind of a weapon and the few cheap, off-the-shelf guards pull their own and track the high windows around and up – unable to distinguish one crazed woman from an armed assault squad.
Then an arm snakes out of the crowd and with a clean, sure swipe slices her throat ear to ear.
The city is big, but not so big as to make the woman’s throat opening up and a fine fanning spray of arterial blood commonplace. The muscle reacts first, being now freckled with potentially dangerous infected blood, and draws and aims . . . at nothing but the already twitchy street. At the sight of the weapons being quickly drawn and dropped to street level, anyone who has any kind of survival skills instantly turns and runs. To a streetful of people used to sudden urban violence, turning and running is called a riot. Luckily for the muscle and the few really innocent bystanders, the riot had a place to go: down the street like water down a cascade, away from the Men with Guns, away from the dangerous Blood, away from the Rich People being thrown into their cars by their over-reacting bodyguards.
The street is nearly quiet very soon after save for the wailing of an approaching ambulance, called in a moment of rare altruism by one of the suits, and the last foaming, crackling bubbles from the woman’s throat.
The ambulance, one of the new Matzitas, arrives with a pulsing Doppler scream, parting the few bystanders who linger over the cooling corpse of the woman. Pulling up to the low curb, it clamshells open and coolly – as only micromechanicals and smartpolyplastics can – reaches out and touches her with the preciseness of Japanese manufacture. Like-born, the medic steps from the uncoiling and undulating machines, orchestrating their movements with a palm-sized control unit.
Screened, probed, touched, sampled, sniffed, smelled, she is neatly picked off the cold and dirty sidewalk and swallowed into the ambulance’s expanded interior.
Leaving behind the bodyguards giving statements to bored cops, the impatient suits, and the hungry stares of the onlookers, the ambulance closes with her and the medic inside and screams away.
Death is too easy for me. See it every day. No, that’s not the truth: some days I sit in the hospital bay with the warm and humming ambulance and just wait for it. But the deaths I do see – the leaking, shrieking, whining, crying ones – reach beyond their occasions to swallow me, even when I do nothing but sit in the bay and watch teevee. One of those deaths can last days for me, stretching beyond its instant.
It’s easy to die, when you’re like me. I mean if s easy to die, period, man. Slip in the tub, get iced for your wallet, the new strains, acts of God – all of it man. Easy as pie to lie down and croak – and it’s easy when you’re like me to get right back up again.
I try not to get used to it, try not to have them stretch so far that they start to die in my dreams, when I eat, when I’m away from the ambulance. But I’ve been at it too long – they die in slippery, out-of-focus dreams and even when I sit down for dinner, soup becomes blood, meat becomes . . . meat. I look into everyone else’s eyes and expect to see the things I’ve seen reflected back at me, but I don’t. I don’t know what they see, but it sure isn’t what I see – what feels like every day.
Like me, yeah. Painful, sure, but you just gotta lie back and think of the money. Isn’t that how it always is? Fucking for money, getting fucked for money – I just happen to get fucked over for money, that’s all. The big fuck, maybe, but still . . . I’m a whore. A whore with a specialty, that’s all. A real specialty.
I look at people differently, I guess. You do that when you see them dying, when you see them hurt and crying. I don’t see them as they always look – smiling, laughing, getting angry . . . kissing or touching. . . . I see them broken and leaking, discovering that they’re meat and bones and blood. I see them in pain. Had a few girls in my life, even have two myself, now, but it’s strange to see them, hear them and even crawl into bed with them when you see the things I see. I keep expecting them to break, to leak, to cry. I see it all the time – so often it doesn’t seem right that they aren’t hurting or dying.
Morley rigged it, the sick bastard. “There’s a need, babe, a need we can fill.” Yeah, you bastard – creeps like to fuck dead girls, so what do they need? You fucking guessed it. Problem is your usual dead chick will get all, kind of. . . unappealing after a point, right? What you need is a dead chick who can get up and walk out when the John’s finished. What you need is me – or me after Morley.
Sometimes, the most real women I see are the ones who are lying still and cooling in the ambulance with me. The rest of them, the rest of the people I see, are just waiting to see me.
“Just rearrange you a bit,” he says and gives me to his pals with the machines, the plastic parts, the implants. Technique noir, black tech, nasty bedroom tech. I remember one of them, this fat Chinese with skin like cheese – a clicking and whirring part of his face looking me over with God knows what: radar, microwaves, frigging sound for all I know. I remember him for the clicking and the whirring, and how he only spoke a few words of English. He also fucked me, I’m sure, while I was zoned under his machines, under his knife. My pussy smelled bad the next day, something that could’ve been come leaked out – smelled an awful lot like cheese, too.
Like this one, here: they look so peaceful, so rested and still. Their skin is so cool, so smooth. Even with the blood . . . but I can fix that, a little swipe with disinfectant, a dab or two with a biohazard absorbent towelette. Such a long wound, a thin slice from ear to ear. Clean, must have been a fractal knife, or a monomolecular wire. Still, she is beautiful. Striking. Frozen at the peak of her beauty by the knife, or maybe that wire. Her face is like a magnet and I have a hard time doing the routine things I’m supposed to do. The implant and blood-screen fall away because of my enhancement. It’s all I can do to sit in the back and let the ambulance drive itself to Mercy. She has high, sharp cheekbones; a nose with just enough of an upturn; lips full but not cartoonish. She has such a natural, wild look, this one has. I can see her not lying, cooling, chilling, in the back of my ambulance, her ne
gative signs showing on half a dozen flat-screen monitors, but rather running under a hot sun somewhere, naked and warm, wild grasses shushing by her fine, perfectly turned legs, not-too-big, not-too-small breasts bobbing and swinging free and bare under the same glowing sun. She isn’t a casualty, a DOA, a street drek; she is a primeval forest huntress, a priestess of a land long ago paved and sterilized.
I’m a corpse. I’m a professional victim, a stiff for hire. Pull my string (okay, slit my throat, strangle me) and I do my little number. And while I’m down there on your floor, on your bed, you can do whatever you want to do to me. Special job, as only Morley’s dark doctors could have done. Don’t know all of it myself – one lung gone for a refillable tank of air (so no breathing)y blood now flowing through the back of my neck so my throat can get sliced or crushed if you like that kind of thing. On cue I get all cold, my nipples get all stiff, my cunt chills, my eyes lock up (in case you like to see your reflection in them when you fuck my stiff self) and I’m dead. Everything but the smell of lilies. Pay in advance, don’t break the rules, and you can kill me, fuck me, and go back to the wife and kids. It’s a living, dying is . . .
So beautiful. So natural she looks, even cooling and stiffening. She is a statue, an image on clear water. I try to be quiet, watching her, so as not to wake her. The image of her, quiet and still and not really, truly dead is so strong it’s almost enough to dissipate the clean wound across her throat, the whining instruments all crying she’s dead and the few specks of blood that remain on her poncho. Carefully, so as not to wake her, I move the poncho aside to better see her breasts – and so lovely they are: just the right size, somewhere between a nice cleavage and too small. They are fine, tight cones of deeply tanned skin. I can’t see her nipples, covered as they are by crosses of tape (a recent style). I notice as I move the poncho that her pants end a bit below her navel, that her navel is pierced with a steel ring, and that she has the tiniest of bellies – a gentle rise to her stomach that seems so perfect on her. It adds something to her, this little belly does – when everyone can look like anyone (with enough money, of course) this little pot brings her right down to me, in the ambulance. She is a woman, a wild and fiery woman – all heat and hunger. Dead yes, but more alive than most of the meat I haul to the hospital.